I remember the background graphics of Valhalla being quite good. And I also seem to remember the stick men moving quite well. It had quite a lot of atmosphere iirc.

There was a whole host of Spectrum games that I seem to recall as being unfathomable: Gift From The Gods, Braxx Bluff, Dark Star....they seemed to be graphics experiments with a scoreboard plonked somewhere on the screen.

And did anyone know how to get past the first screen on "The Pyramid"?

Okay, now THIS fucking rocked! More playable then the C64 version (as usual: better graphics, clunky gameplay), and the slow-motion replay option was useful for viewing your opponant's Spec-tacular crash and burn.

Yeah. In Avalon these ghost things used to appear and throw stuff at you if you hung around too long in one room. And the creaky noise that bad guys made as they walked round a room was very atmospheric.

I think my favourite spectrum games are Ranarama and Quazatron (among the many fine games published by Hewson).
I loved the exploration 'combat' mini-games that allowed you to upgrade your skills if you won the right runes/parts.
Ooh, apparently there was a sequel to Quazatron! Must check that out.

I had an Amstrad CPC rather than a Speccy - but Ranarama was and is a great game. One thing I remember about it: the tape version was cleverly coded so that there was a little tune embedded in the "loading noise" just before the game finished loading.

Is it wrong that I had an ineffable urge to correct Grimly's BASIC syntax up above?

My friend was really stuck on a bit've Monty Mole and I lied and told him I had a poke for infinite lives. He phoned me up, I made up some number Poke 16789726 or whatever and then when it didn't work he got so mad he smashed the casette into pieces. I only told him a few years ago.

I am glad that all these Speccy mags are online now because... well, I have a confession. For ages I read Sinclair User. Even though it's the one of the three I have pretty much no fond memories of, it's the one I spent money on every month. And I only started buying it because I forgot what date Crash was due out, went to the newsagent too early and bought SU instead. Eventually I saw the light they put the price up and I went over to YS though.

Some good free games, mind, but all the mags had their moments in that last-years-of-Spectrum scramble to grab readers by filling them with as many old games as possible every month. Oh, and thank you Crash for awesome reader homebrews (?) Shuriken and Egghead!

Oh yes, much love to all the Horaces, the Dizzy games (even though every single one I couldn't complete even with a walkthrough/map because there was always one last coin that wasn't where the map said it was), Manic Miner and JSW (though I spent longer playing JSW 2 - same game, added space levels, quite a cheap knockoff sequel I suppose with Matthew Smith not involved, but I liked the new areas), er... what else did I spend ages on? Rainbow Islands, Artic's 16k Galaxians, Bruce Lee, but I guess there were better formats for all those.

I gave up on the Speccy in 1991 when within a few months a) I bought Monkey Island for the PC and b) there was an advert in YS for PC Format and I decided the PC was THE FUTURE. A life of already-ancient Sierra games and roguelikes, pissing about in Fractint and POVray, and having to fight with autoexec.bat trying to free enough memory without losing Soundblaster drivers awaited. Woo.